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Friday, July 25, 2014

Using Content Marketing and Lead Nurturing to Grow Your Business

By Erin Quinlan

As a business owner, you obviously want your business to grow.

To do this, you should implement a strong content management system and nurture your leads to help drive conversion rates among these leads.

The idea behind content marketing is simple, give people interesting and relevant information about topics they care about. Content marketing generates interest in your site as a rewarding place to visit, establishes trust and improves brand and website loyalty, attracts a community of like-minded consumers, and earns links and builds your target audience.

The purpose of content strategy has also been described as achieving business goals by maximizing the impact of content.

Followers will come back to you as loyal customers, and they’ll share your information and link to your site. The more they like and link, the higher you’ll rank on search engines’ algorithms and the more potential customers will see what you have to say.

Now that you have these people interested, you have to close the deal. But how?

Lead nurturing.

When acquiring leads, make sure they are quality leads. Quantity is less important than quality for a small business with limited sales resources.

Have an instant response system. Make sure to alert the prospect that you are going to contact them. Also ask for more information right away, driven by what you received from the lead source. Then make sure you contact the prospect within the time you promised.

Offer immediate value to the potential customer. What could you give them just for interacting with you?

You will also want to listen closely to understand what the prospect seeks.

Once you have the lead, give him or her a special place to interact with you. Make it easy to find, and a conduit to a live person that responds quickly.

Get permission to stay in touch and give the prospect options for either e-mail or phone communications. Then make sure to stay actively in touch. Remind them of the details of the conversation, which have been captured in your nurturing system.

You can also offer the lead more value. Make a special offer or package deal – also driven by what you learned while you were listening and noting the needs expressed by the prospect.

One great way to see how things are going is to track the content and results of all interactions.

We’ve already discussed listening, but listen some more. This includes keeping all relevant information in one place so that you always have the lead’s history with you close at hand.

You can also ask for a referral. You don’t have to wait for the sale to close to ask for a referral. However, use your judgment and only ask people who are clearly happy with how you have handled them so far.

A big part of lead nurturing is learning from your mistakes and adjusting your lead generation and conversion systems to improve your return on investment.

Ready to jump in?

Give The Silent Partner Marketing a call at 866-432-6456 or e-mail Kyle Reyes at kyle@thesilentpartnermarketing.com and we can get you started.

----Erin Quinlan is the Content Marketing Manager of The Silent Partner Marketing, a boutique marketing firm focused on helping businesses grow in an age of exploding technology. You can find The Silent Partner Marketing on Google+, Facebook, and Twitter.